For Business Week reporter Paul Barrett, the gun industry has always been a fascinating topic. "There is really no other business that is so tied up with American history, American politics, law, culture, popular culture, and incessant controversy," he says. In his book, Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, out this week, Barrett goes behind the scenes at one of the world's most successful, and secretive, gun companies.

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The Glock debuted in the 1980s, and now its everywhere. How did it become so popular so quickly?

Gaston Glock had enormous good fortune. He designed this gun originally for the Austrian Army, and that timing was determined by much deeper history. The pistols that the Austrian Army had been using since World War II were falling apart and they needed something new, so he put his hand up and, to everyones surprise in Austria, was able to get together with various experts and win this contract and introduce this very innovative pistol.

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Meanwhile, in the United States, American police officers were feeling that they were outgunned by criminals. A series of incidentsincluding an FBI shootout with a couple of psychotic bank robbers in Miami in 1986persuaded the American cops that the gun they had been using for 75 years, the classic Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, was no longer potent enough. They needed something new. And here came Gaston Glock saying, "I have the pistol of the future, and it addresses exactly what you feel you are lacking."

So basically, in the same way that American auto manufacturers were caught with their pants down a decade earlier by cheaper, more durable, more efficiently made Japanese and German cars, the American gun establishment was caught unaware by [Gaston] Glock. And before they knew it, he had made this huge incursion on their market. Once he won over the police, he used that as leverage to win attention in the larger and more lucrative civilian market.

Gaston Glock was not a gun designerhe was an engineer and a manufacturer. Did not having a background in firearm design help him think outside of the box?

Glock stumbled into this and really changed the market for exactly the reason you just saidbecause he started with a blank piece of paper. He came up with a gun design before he even had a gun factory. So a factory was built to produce this particular gun and as a result of that, the factory is almost uniquely efficient, and the gun has been uniquely profitable as a result. His costs are so low that he was able to sell the gun very cheaply and basically grab the market away from companies like Smith & Wesson.

What design features did the Glock have that gave it the edge over more traditional revolvers?

Rather than six rounds, the Glock has 17 rounds in the magazine. Instead of a 12-pound trigger pull, like the traditional revolver, it has a trigger pull of slightly more than 5 pounds. That means that someone who is a mediocre shooter or a bad shooteras many police officers who dont practice often enough arewill suddenly become more accurate and be more effective.

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The gun is much lighter, so that if youre wearing it on your hip for 8 or 10 hours, it will be more comfortable. The Glock is literally made in a plastic mold as opposed to being assembled from steel. Its what makes it so light; and what allows the gun to have the large capacity [is that] the plastic is very thin. The Glock is also more durable and will function if its not cleaned properly or regularly.

Its also different from other pistols in that it has no external trigger safety. Theres the main trigger and then theres what looks like a little baby trigger. The gun doesnt work unless you depress them both. That was marketed as an innovation, but it was also a reason that the gun design has been heavily criticized by gun-control advocatesbecause it is true that there is no way to put it on safety. The gun is always on.

And the Glock has a radically smaller number of component parts36 or 38than comparable handguns by other manufacturers, which typically have twice as many parts. And this is significant because if there are fewer parts, there are fewer parts to break. Moreover, the Glock parts are entirely interchangeable. So if youve got a bunch of Glock 17s or a bunch of Glock 19s you can shuffle all the parts around and put them into any gun, which makes them very appealing to police departments that have hundreds or thousands of weapons.

What role did gun control play in making the Glock a popular weapon?

Efforts to restrict the Glock by name were hugely important. For example, when the gun first showed up in the United States, gun-control advocates said this gun is extremely and uniquely dangerous because its made mostly out of plastic so airport security machines wont detect it. There was a huge controversy over this. There were congressional hearings in 86 and 87, and some jurisdictions, such as New York City, banned the Glock.

But this allegation was just factually incorrect. Airport security machines did detect the Glock because theyre mostly X-ray machines, and X-rays see plastic just the way they see metal. Moreover, by weight, the Glock is actually mostly metal anyway. The slide is made out of steel, so if you do have a magnetometer, it should detect that slide. And if someone is staring at it and knows what theyre looking for, they should be able to see it. This was a huge embarrassment for gun-control forces and a huge boon for Glock. There is no better way in the United States to get attention for a gun than to suggest its extremely potent and effective.

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Theres a lot of talk about Glocks being the weapon of choice for criminals. But thats not actually true, is it?

There is no doubt that the Glock appeals to criminals in the same way that it appeals to civilians. But as a statistical matter, it never became as prevalent in terms of being found at crime scenes as Hollywood or television police procedurals might suggest.

And theres a simple reason for that. The Glock, while its not a super-expensive gun, is also not a cheap gun. Its not a Saturday night special. And while there are certainly Glocks on the black market, and there certainly are criminals who use them, it has never become quite as prevalent as really cheap knockoff guns, or even as prevalent as .38 Smith & Wesson revolvers, which have just been around longer so theres more of them floating around.

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The Glock isnt just a gunits a pop-culture symbol. Do you have a favorite reference?

Sure. This was the first time, as far as I could determine, that the Glock showed up on the big screen: A clever Hollywood prop guy put the gun into the second Die Hard movie. And the screenplay writer actually wrote a little soliloquy that Bruce Willis gave in which he named the Glock. And Willis, whos playing this hard-bitten, Los Angeles police detective, "That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? Its a porcelain gun made in Germany. Dosent show up on your airport X-ray machines, and it cost more than you make in a month."

Every single thing he said about the Glock was factually incorrect, and yet people went to the movie and said, "Whats a Glock?" Everyone wanted to know what it was. Gun people loved it because, like car people and foodies, they love to find examples of pop culture getting the facts wrong. And from there on, the Glock became Hollywoods favorite gun.

It also became the favorite gun of the ascendant popular music, namely hip-hop music. And if youre familiar with David Foster Wallace, theres a great scene in his most famous book, Infinite Jest, in which a character who is a junior tennis champion intimidates his opponents by coming onto the court and threatening to shoot himself if he loses a point. And Wallace rhapsodizes about the Glock for a paragraph. Its a perfect illustration of how the gun has taken on an aura well beyond its use as an actual weapon.

You call the Glock Americas handgun. Why has the it made more of an impact here than anywhere else?

It has had a big impact elsewhere, but more as a police and military weapon. And the explanation is quite straightforward: The United States is by far the biggest and richest civilian gun market in the world. No one knows exactly how many guns are privately owned in this country, because there is no gun census and theres no [uniform] registration of guns, but reasonable estimates run somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 or 300 million guns privately held. Thats not the cops and thats not the military. Now that is also not just handguns, by the way. Thats handguns, rifles, shotguns, everything. And theyre still selling. So we have almost a gun per citizen, and yet every year the gun industry sells more. This is an extraordinary marketplace.